A Savage Continent

By the time he dictated his memoirs in the early 1570s, the French commander Blaise de Monluc had spent a lifetime in battle, and he had the scars to prove it. His face was covered by a leather mask because of a bullet that had taken off his nose and shattered his cheekbones. In Italy, he had defended Siena in the siege of 1554 against the Florentines, and he went on to kill Huguenots by the cartload in the French Wars of Religion (1562-98). He became known as the king's butcher, traveling everywhere with two hangmen. "One might see all thereabouts which way I had gone," he wrote, "the Trees upon the...